Verification of cardiac tissue electrophysiology simulators using an N-version benchmark

Area of Science:

• Computational Biology
• Biophysics
• Scientific Computing

Background:

• Advanced computational frameworks simulate cardiac tissue electrophysiology for detailed heart modeling.
• High-performance computing enhances cardiac virtual physiological human models.
• Verifying the accuracy of complex cardiac simulation codes is increasingly challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish the first cardiac tissue electrophysiology simulation benchmark.
• To provide a gold-standard solution for code verification.
• To facilitate the validation of novel simulation codes and numerical methods.

Main Methods:

• Development of a cardiac tissue electrophysiology simulation benchmark.
• Evaluation of the benchmark across 11 diverse simulation platforms.
• Generation of a consensus gold-standard converged solution.

Main Results:

• Successful creation and evaluation of the cardiac electrophysiology benchmark.
• Establishment of a consensus gold-standard solution.
• Demonstration of the benchmark's utility for code verification.

Conclusions:

• The developed benchmark and gold-standard solution are crucial for verifying cardiac simulation codes.
• This work addresses the critical need for reliable verification in computational cardiac modeling.
• Future simulation codes and numerical methods can be rigorously validated using this benchmark.